As our world become increasing technologically complex we see a lot more overlap between different schools of education that were once very much siloed. We find this is especially true about areas involving information technology were new techniques can have applications across many fields and open up opportunities for those whose knowledge combines seemingly unrelated areas of study. There are very few areas of science that are not going to see plenty of change as advanced information technology is applied to solve problems.

This is very much true of Medicine. We saw the first wave of this in areas like medical imaging in the late 20th century. We are now seeing a new technological wave being driven by a combination of technological advances and governments looking to contain the growth of healthcare costs by applying technology. Where as before a degree in radiography would give you a non biology related entrance to the medical field, people are now using degrees like Masters in Machine Learning as a way of entering the healthcare industry.

It has become increasingly clear that many of the future advances in medicine will be by applying advances in artificial intelligence, genetics and big data to create mass personalisation of treatment. The idea being that your treatment would be custom tailored to your unique genetic makeup based on how people with a similar genetic profiles have reacted in the past to treatment. This opens up lucrative career opportunities for people to study combined degree in genetics and information technology.

Another area that is seeing increased investment is in the area of medical robotics, this is a very broad field in which robots are being developed for automating mundane tasks such as delivering medicine or patient monitoring to much more complex tasks like those currently delivered by highly trained doctors. We already see that advances in telemedicine allow for surgeon to use surgical robots as extension of themselves so they can do operations on patients that are hundreds of miles away. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing these surgical robots being controlled completely by an artificial intelligence and doing routine operations on their own.

One area that is rapidly developing is the digitization of medical records. This not only makes it much easier for medical professionals to get detailed information about a patient's medical history, but also opens up an incredible opportunity for the application of artificial intelligence to be used for diagnostics. Previously assumed unrelated symptoms can now be seen in greater context and can lead to identifying the real cause of the patient's illness as well as pointing to the most promising course of treatment.

This opens up lots of opportunities for people with training in previously thought unrelated fields like library science, robotics or statistical analysis to parley those skills into fulfilling careers in the healthcare sector. Especially when that knowledge is combined with complimentary study in the life sciences.